Does Anyone Care About Men's Mental Health? - Matt Rudd

What are you gonna do when you leave school? Are you gonna do a degree? And if you do a degree, how useful is that gonna be and what job are you gonna ... You know, there's this pressure to keep going. And that's all wrapped up with a focus on you have to be a success, particularly as a bloke, not what is it you actually want to do with your life.

(wind blowing) Matt Rudd, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Chris. It's good to be here.

Does life get any easier as you get older in your experience?

No. Thanks for having me. It's been great to be here. Speak to you next time. (laughs)

(laughs) Life doesn't get easier as you get older.

Once you want ... Mm, I think, well, people get happier when they're a lot older. That's the thing. You know about the happiness curve. So, the low point is in your 40s, and then, where you hit rock bottom, and then things start to pick up again when you don't care so much about stuff. So I'm looking forward to my 60th birthday because that's peak happiness.

Why do you think that is? Why is this a U-shaped curve?

Well, that's, that's the whole, that's the whole book, isn't it? It's why, why is it, you know, the points where you've achieved everything if you're lucky that, you know, society expects to you, you to do. Why is it that just at that point, you're, you're extremely unhappy, or not extremely unhappy, quite unhappy? I mean, I, it's, there's a lot of reasons. I think, I think the, the main one in my own experience was, you know, I'd done all these five-year plans. I'd been, you know, done the exams, done, gone to university, gone up the, you know, uh, job ladder, climbed the career ladder, and got married, had kids, all the traditional stuff. And then I kind of popped my head up at the age of 43 and just didn't know what to do next. And I was waking up in the middle of the night. I was catastrophizing, uh, couldn't sleep, and it just got worse and worse. And, and what was interesting, I think you have your own experience. It sounds like, you know, you had quite a few extreme things going on, but for me, it was, it wasn't a crisis, it was more like doldrums, mid-life doldrums, which I think is much more common. If you have a full-blown, blown crisis, you're forced to kind of confront what's going on and, and, and try to change things. But for most of us, it's a kind of struggling on scenario.

That's something that I think about an awful lot, that if you hit rock bottom, there's only one place to go from there. It's one of the reasons why when you watch a movie and the hero falls from grace and then he's drinking and in the gutter and stuff, there's a, a certain amount of romanticism around that because you know that there's only one direction for him to go from there. And the same as anybody that's gone to the gym, if you try and three-quarter squat and then go up from there, it's pretty difficult. But if you bounce out of the bottom, it's actually relatively easy. And I think that you have this in life too, that people can become sedated by comfort, that life's not that good, but it's not that bad either. You don't have the activation energy to actually kick you out of the bottom of whatever you're dealing with. And yeah, that sort of, uh, sedation by comfort, complacency, like not giving up the average for the good or the good for the great, I think that's where a lot of people find themselves.